Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Big Bang Productions Inc.
  • 5.0 (8)
  • Natural Sciences
  • Updated weekly

Think like a physicist. Wonder like a human. Into the Impossible is where Cosmic Conversations happen — uniting Nobel Prize winners, iconoclasts, authors, and technologists to explore reality’s deepest questions. From AI to aliens, from biophysics to the brain, from the cosmos to the multiverse, Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego covers it all. If you’ve ever asked What’s out there? or What’s next?, this is where curiosity meets clarity. Learn to think like this. 🎙 Full episodes, notes & more: briankeating.com/podcast

  1. 1 day ago

    They Built the Quietest Place on Earth to Find Dark Matter

    They Built the Quietest Place on Earth to Find Dark Matter One event in 220 days. That is what the search for dark matter looks like right now. In this episode I talk with Rick Gaitskell, professor of physics at Brown University and a leader on the LZ dark matter experiment, about what it takes to build a detector that can see almost nothing at all: seven tonnes of liquid xenon, a mile of rock in an old gold mine, and shielding so careful that the radon seeping out of ordinary concrete counts as a serious enemy. We get into why the field spent decades hunting the WIMP, what happens to a 3.4 sigma result when you look at it honestly, and why a single event, however beautiful, cannot tell you what you want it to tell you. We also talk about the human side of a project like this. The grad student who waited nine years for data. The physicist who walked away from investment banking. The uncomfortable fact that something like ninety-five percent of research does not work out, and what keeps people going anyway. And the line that sits under all of it: we only get one damn universe, and nature does not care whether your theory is beautiful. Chapters 00:00 One event in 220 days 06:00 Why they named it a WIMP 13:00 Ninety-five percent of research fails 20:00 He left investment banking for this 23:00 You are less than five percent of the universe 30:00 The fifty-year-old idea nobody can kill 45:00 The grad student who waited nine years 58:00 A gold mine and the quietest place on Earth 1:06:00 The radon in your basement is the enemy 1:21:00 The assumption that was hiding the signal 1:32:00 The event, and why they will not call it blinded 1:40:00 How 3.4 sigma becomes 2.6 1:49:00 The fog nobody can scrub 1:56:00 The dark matter we detected in 1956 My books Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir) Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook) Socials Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #RickGaitskell #darkmatter #physics #AI #emergence #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    They Built the Quietest Place on Earth to Find Dark Matter

  2. 3 days ago

    Dark Matter Has a Problem. So Does MOND.

    For 50 years I taught my students that dark matter surrounds the Milky Way in a giant halo, or that Newton’s laws break down at low accelerations. The Gaia satellite just measured something that makes both of those answers uncomfortable. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Gaia has measured over a billion stars. What its third data release shows is that the outer rotation curve of our own galaxy appears to decline in a Keplerian fashion. That should not happen if a dark matter halo is doing what we think it does. It also should not happen if MOND is right, because MOND produces flat curves for isolated galaxies. Both camps predicted something flatter. Neither got it. I walk you through the physics from Kepler to Vera Rubin to Gaia DR3, show you why systematic errors from asymmetric drift, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy matter enormously before anyone draws a conclusion, and lay out the three scenarios that still survive. The most interesting question here is not which side lost. It is why both sides were expecting the wrong curve from our own galaxy. What you’ll hear: -Why the neutrino technically counts as dark matter and why that still leaves most of the problem unsolved -What Kepler’s first law of fatherhood has to do with galactic dynamics -Why Stacy McGaugh and Mordehai Milgrom might be celebrating too soon -What Cepheids, stellar streams, and globular clusters could tell us that Gaia cannot -Whether the Milky Way is too messy to ever give us a clean answer “The question is not which camp won, but why we were both expecting the wrong curve.” — Brian Keating CHAPTERS 00:00 Two solutions. One problem. Neither wins. 02:12 What Vera Rubin actually found 03:18 We're inside the galaxy. That's the problem. 04:24 The asymmetric drift problem 05:04 What Gaia DR3 actually shows 06:34 Why the mass estimate is model-dependent 08:04 MOND: no radius, no problem. Until now. 08:56 Gaia may be saying both sides are wrong 09:24 Flaws lead to new laws 10:22 LMC, Sagittarius, and the galactic warp 12:28 Three viable explanations 12:42 Dark matter adjusts. MOND adjusts. But is that enough? 13:14 What could settle this 14:04 Are we expecting the wrong curve? Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Related episodes: Stacy McGaugh episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnpyFk2WlME My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #darkmatter #MOND #MilkyWay #cosmology #briankeating #intotheimpossible #physics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    Dark Matter Has a Problem. So Does MOND.

  3. 9 Sept

    OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes Claim: Is This What AGI Looks Like? with Emad Mostaque

    Did OpenAI just solve Navier–Stokes—and what would that actually mean for AGI? Emad Mostaque joins Brian Keating LIVE to examine the claimed breakthrough, what would count as a verified solution, and whether AI solving a major mathematical problem changes the debate about intelligence—or control. Watch my explainer about AI and the Navier-Stokes problem, including insights from Terry Tao https://youtu.be/je9X59psm6U?si=wGbcLhXmf47jeCHL?sub_confirmation=1 A convincing answer isn’t necessarily a proof. A mathematical breakthrough isn’t automatically AGI. But if this claim holds up, how much should we update our expectations? Emad helped bring Stable Diffusion to the world and signed the letter calling for a pause on frontier AI development. In his previous conversation with Brian and AI safety researcher Roman Yampolskiy, he questioned how such a pause could work—and highlighted swarm intelligence as a particularly dangerous and unpredictable risk. Now we return to the question underneath the excitement: if AI’s capabilities are accelerating, is our ability to understand and control them keeping up? ON THE TABLE: • What exactly is being claimed about Navier–Stokes? • What separates a proposed solution from an accepted mathematical proof? • If the result holds up, does it demonstrate AGI—or something narrower? • Can AI produce discoveries that humans struggle to verify? • What would this change about open-source AI and the argument for a pause? • Are we watching the wrong risk: a single superintelligence, or swarms of AI agents? • What evidence would change Emad’s mind? Bring your questions. We’ll examine the claim, the evidence, and what follows if it’s right. This livestream discusses a claimed result; it does not assume the Millennium Prize Problem has been resolved. FEATURED GUEST: Emad Mostaque on Twitter/X: https://x.com/EMostaque I.I.I. Inc.: https://ii.inc/ Stable Diffusion / Stability AI: https://stability.ai/ Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? Claim your meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon for unfiltered bonus content and live monthly Office Hours: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join MY BOOKS: Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue audiobook: https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un CONNECT WITH BRIAN: Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #OpenAI #NavierStokes #AGI #EmadMostaque #ArtificialIntelligence #BrianKeating #IntoTheImpossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes Claim: Is This What AGI Looks Like? with Emad Mostaque

  4. 1 Sept

    Roman Yampolskiy vs Emad Mostaque: I Was The Only Optimist - #569

    The man who open-sourced the most-used AI image model in history sat down with the man who has spent a decade proving superintelligence cannot be controlled. Brian set up a debate. What emerged was something more unsettling than any debate. Roman Yampolskiy is the computer scientist who coined the term AI safety and author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Emad Mostaque is the co-founder of Stable Diffusion and the only AI CEO who signed the pause letter. He now says he doesn’t know how a pause could work. Yampolskiy thinks that is the only option left. The question underneath everything is simple: if you have a 50% chance of wiping out civilization and you build it anyway, what are you actually doing? We cover what AI safety researchers actually think the danger is, why nobody has published a paper, filed a patent, or shipped a prototype for controlling a superintelligence, what the Qwen weights being out means for the pause argument, and why Mostaque thinks swarm intelligence is the most dangerous and most unpredictable risk vector we have. What you’ll hear: -Why both guests think P(doom) tells you less than you’d hope -What it means that no company, no lab, and no team has a patent on controlling superintelligence -Why the models the public receives are slightly lobotomized -The difference between an AI swarm and the ASI everyone is debating -Why giving every psychopath access to a cutting-edge intelligence weapon is incoherent safety strategy -What it would actually take to update Yampolskiy’s assessment “We either do it, or we die. There is nothing for you to gain by doing it.” — Roman Yampolskiy CHAPTERS 00:00 A debate that wasn't a debate 00:36 Turing test, AGI, superintelligence: where are we? 02:02 The open source argument nobody wins 03:32 Pause frontier AI forever. Which button? 05:04 P(doom): parameterizing our ignorance 09:02 Nukes are inefficient. AI isn't. 11:46 The lobotomized model problem 18:04 Decade-old problems solved weekly now 26:18 We either do it or we die 31:10 Stop the training or stop the funders 33:34 Lipstick on a Shoggoth 35:50 No paper. No patent. No framework. 39:42 Train only on what you need 44:14 What lowers Mostaque's p(doom)? 52:00 Same future. Two perspectives. Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guests: Roman Yampolskiy on Twitter/X: https://x.com/romanyam?lang=en AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/103257626X MIRI: https://intelligence.org Emad Mostaque on Twitter/X: https://x.com/EMostaque I.I.I. Inc.: https://ii.inc/ Stable Diffusion: https://stability.ai/ My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #AIrisk #aisafety #stablediffusion #RomanYampolskiy #EmadMostaque #briankeating #intotheimpossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  5. 28 Aug

    The Universe Didn’t Come From Nothing | The Peter McCormack Show

    I joined Peter McCormack to dig into one of the deepest unanswered questions in physics: what is time, and why does it only seem to move in one direction? My answer might surprise you. Time may not be a fundamental feature of reality at all, and understanding space, matter, and energy still doesn't mean we understand the universe itself. We cover: - What may have existed before the Big Bang - Why something can't truly come from nothing - How my work with the Simons Observatory could detect gravitational waves from the universe's earliest moments - What dark matter actually means - Why even a film as detail-obsessed as Interstellar still gets the physics wrong. The conversation then turns from cosmic time to human time: mortality, family, meaning, and attention. We get into UFO disclosure, the collapse of institutional trust, and whether AI can ever reproduce the embodied human insight that let Einstein transform physics. My take: AI remains a tool built to serve humanity, and it's time we stop apologizing for humanity's greatness. ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    The Universe Didn’t Come From Nothing | The Peter McCormack Show

  6. 25 Aug

    The Physics Reason AI Works When It Shouldn’t - #568

    The same mathematics that explains why a fridge magnet sticks to your refrigerator also explains why neural networks work when they have no right to. His group did the calculation. Nobody else had. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Goldenfeld is a Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences who spent 36 years at the University of Illinois applying condensed matter physics to problems everyone else had given up on: why the genetic code is optimal, why early life evolved impossibly fast, and why AI works despite being overparameterized beyond anything classical statistics can explain. The thread connecting all three is one idea: that what emerges from many things together is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. That idea explains magnetism, AI, the origin of the genetic code, and why life may be inevitable wherever the laws of physics apply. He also argues that what is happening to science right now is not a disagreement about facts but a fracture in how people decide what is true, and that is a more dangerous problem. What you’ll hear: -Why the same phase transition that explains magnetism also explains why AI works at all -Why Francis Crick concluded life must have come from outer space and what Goldenfeld found instead -What horizontal gene transfer has to do with how libraries work -Why Goldenfeld thinks Enceladus is a better bet for life than Europa -The purpose of life, stated as a thermodynamics problem -Why “different is more” is more useful than “more is different” “The impact you make is the ratio of what you do divided by what everybody else does. Minimize the denominator.” — Nigel Goldenfeld CHAPTERS 00:00 AI shouldn't work. It does. 00:56 What is a phase transition? 03:10 What the renormalization group does 08:54 Ising gave up. Wrong dimension. 13:32 Nigel almost met Ising. 40 minutes away. 26:38 AI is the best example of more is different 33:52 Bardeen won two Nobels. The transistor looked like chewing gum. 37:24 The three mysteries Crick couldn't solve 46:20 The genetic code can't evolve. And yet it did. 49:00 How early life evolved like a library 57:06 The purpose of life as a physics problem 01:00:04 Life is physics, not chemistry 01:05:56 Anti-science age. Not because of opinions. 01:13:00 20 seconds with your 20-year-old self 01:17:14 Different is more Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Nigel Goldenfeld website: https://guava.physics.ucsd.edu/~nigel/ Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201554097?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackNigel Goldenfeld on Twitter/X: https://x.com/NigelGoldenfeld My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #NigelGoldenfeld #physics #AI #originoflife #condensedmatterphysics #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    The Physics Reason AI Works When It Shouldn’t - #568

  7. 18 Aug

    Engineering Chair: Most People Should Not Go To College - #567

    The system that produces the world’s most important discoveries runs on metrics that nobody agrees on, odds that would stop most people, and mentorship that sometimes looks like cruelty in blue ink. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Lipomi is Professor and Chair of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester and the author of Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research. His lab works on organic electronics, materials science, recyclable polymers, and the science of human touch. He trained under George Whitesides at Harvard, one of the most cited chemists who has never won the Nobel Prize. The conversation covers the H-index, what elite mentorship actually looks like when your advisor writes “This is illiterate” in blue ink on your outline, and what the future of academic research versus industry careers looks like in an era of AI, demographic headwinds, and graduate school debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. We also get into homochirality, OLED displays, and why Lipomi thinks the nanotechnology revolution already happened, we just didn’t call it that. What you’ll hear: -Whether the academic system is designed to produce scientists or to filter them out -What is Baumol’s cost disease and why it explains rising tuition costs -Why the nanotechnology revolution already happened and nobody called it that -How nanotechnology is used in cancer drug delivery today versus what science fiction promised -What it actually takes to build a PhD career at the intersection of chemistry, mechanics, and neuroscience -Whether engineering students should be reading Plato — and what countries that skip it are getting right “Find a skill at the intersection of three or more interests that no one else is working on.” — Darren Lipomi CHAPTERS 00:00 He says don't go to college. He runs the department. 01:10 The H-index: imperfect, irreplaceable 02:04 1 in 20 PhDs gets the job 05:42 The meteorite and the origin of life 08:34 Did life's asymmetry come from space? 12:00 Who is an organic materials chemist at 3am? 13:52 The collaboration that started at a coffee shop 15:22 The nanobot revolution already happened 18:24 Nanotechnology inside your body right now 19:08 The $70 billion invention Kodak gave away 22:12 Kodak, Xerox, Bausch + Lomb: what Rochester built 26:06 Working under Whitesides at Harvard 28:54 What he wrote on the outline in blue ink 30:38 Who you work with matters more than what you work on 31:56 Department chair: hostage negotiator, not boss 34:36 Why the department changed its name after 110 years 36:00 The headwinds have never been stronger 38:44 Should engineers read Plato? 39:38 The debt you can't discharge in bankruptcy 40:06 Do you buy Baumol's cost disease? 43:14 Why he had to write the book 48:16 The Fisher-Price camcorder experiment 51:06 Teaching in one sentence. Research in one. 53:42 Losing Darren to Rochester: the Fernando Tatis analogy Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    Engineering Chair: Most People Should Not Go To College - #567

  8. 11 Aug

    John Martinis: The Nobel Physicist Behind Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling - #566

    John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for proving macroscopic quantum tunneling is real. Less than a year later he’s telling why he left Google’s quantum computing team to start over. Subscribe if you want the physics and the politics of building the impossible. Martinis is the co-founder of Colab and one of the physicists who proved ordinary quantum rules apply to macroscopic systems. He built his career on the same Josephson-junction hardware his Nobel is built on, then led Google’s superconducting-qubit effort, the same team behind Google’s 2019 quantum supremacy claim, before an internal reorg pushed him out. We go into Anthony Leggett’s challenge to Schrödinger’s cat, what decoherence in quantum mechanics really means, and whether quantum computing is the first technology ever born from pure theory rather than experiment. We also cover the internal Google reorg that pushed Martinis out and what he learned about building something new inside a large institution. Whether quantum mechanics applies to the macroscopic world and what it took to prove it Why Martinis thinks quantum computing may be the first technology born from pure theory, not experiment What negative authority means and why it matters for anyone building something new inside a large institution Whether the US can win the quantum computing race against China How Martinis thinks about quantum mechanics interpretations after spending a career inside the math “Always be on the lookout for the impossible, right?” John Martinis CHAPTERS 00:00  The Nobel call that almost wasn't 01:01  How his wife found out before he did 03:32  Anthony Leggett's challenge to Schrödinger's cat 05:53  Why a Josephson junction, not a quantum dot or trapped ion 07:45  Quantized oscillations: the “smoking gun” and Balmer's ghost 08:18  Measuring the system: the resonance experiment 11:21  Systematic effects: what separates a good scientist from a lucky one 13:42  The Ed Ohm story: the man who found the CMB and doubted it 15:01  Wigner's “unreasonably effective” math and the weirdest thing about QM 16:54  The transistor myth: chewing gum, coat hangers, and germanium 17:34  Microwave engineering meets quantum mechanics 19:26  Decoherence: the friction you can't live without 24:06  The heretical claim: does theory ever precede technology? 28:22  The “paper qubit” problem 29:34  What quantum computers are actually good for 32:27  Should quantum computing be regulated like AI? 33:35  US vs. China: the quantum computing race 35:44  Collapse, Copenhagen, or many worlds? Martinis's answer 37:43  Leaving Google: “essentially demoted” 40:48  Why Colab exists and what “negative authority” means 42:50  The real bottleneck: funding, not physics 43:31  Final advice: always be on the lookout for the impossible Qolab: https://qolab.ai/ Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast Landing page: https://awake-mill-k25t.here.now #intotheimpossible #briankeating #JohnMartinis #NobelPrize #quantumcomputing #physics #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    John Martinis: The Nobel Physicist Behind Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling - #566
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Think like a physicist. Wonder like a human. Into the Impossible is where Cosmic Conversations happen — uniting Nobel Prize winners, iconoclasts, authors, and technologists to explore reality’s deepest questions. From AI to aliens, from biophysics to the brain, from the cosmos to the multiverse, Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego covers it all. If you’ve ever asked What’s out there? or What’s next?, this is where curiosity meets clarity. Learn to think like this. 🎙 Full episodes, notes & more: briankeating.com/podcast

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